Today's Supreme Court ruling leaves no ambiguity for the next president

U.S. Supreme Court
Justices Chief Justice John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy applaud
prior to President Obama's State of the Union speech on Capitol
Hill in Washington, February 12, 2013Reuters/Charles Dharapak

The Supreme Court handed the Obama administration a significant
victory on Thursday, when it upheld a key provision of the
Affordable Care Act that allows the federal government to keep
distributing subsidies to help low-income Americans buy health
insurance.

But the decision's ramifications could be felt in the 2016
election and beyond, especially if a Republican wins the White
House next year.

That's because the Supreme Court not only ruled the federal
subsidies are legal under the Affordable Care Act, but it also
did not leave any ambiguity that would allow a future
administration to interpret the law differently.

"The court focused
definitively and said, this is what the law means,"
said MaryBeth Musumeci, an associate director at the
Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured.

The challengers in
the case argued the way the law was written does not allow for
subsidized insurance in states where the federal government had
set up insurance exchanges. Instead, the challengers argued,
insurance subsidies are allowed only in states that have set up
their own exchanges. They pointed to a clause
that they argued meant exchanges should be "established by the
state."

A brief
history: In 2011, the IRS issued a regulation that interpreted a
part of the law in question to mean that the federal government
could issue the subsidies. But in its opinion Thursday, the
Supreme Court majority said that decision should not be left up
to a government agency to interpret, since Congress did not make
that explicit in the Affordable Care Act.

Instead, the high court disregarded the agency's interpretation
and ruled on the statute on its own. It said the decision should
not be left up to the agency, which means a future administration
cannot change that interpretation.

"If the court had left in question about whether
there should have been deference to the agency, that would have
left the door open potentially for another administration running
that agency to say, ‘OK, this is ambiguous language, and we have
a different legal interpretation,'" Musumeci said.

Jumaane Cook (bottom R),
age 5, of Cleveland, Ohio stands with his father James Cook
(obscured, holding sign at R) as they join Obamacare supporters
demonstrating at the Supreme Court building in Washington March
4, 2015.REUTERS/Jonathan
Ernst

Practically, this means that a theoretical
future Republican president could not come in and say that the
federal government cannot hand out subsidies.

That might not be a practical solution: After
all, by the time a Republican president could enter into office,
millions of additional people would benefit from subsidies handed
out under the law. But there's no longer even an option: The
Supreme Court has definitively determined that the federal
government can provide subsidies under the law.

"Because the Court has provided its own,
definitive interpretation of the ambiguous statute — and
held that it will not defer to the agency’s interpretation — a
subsequent presidential administration (say, a Republican
Administration) cannot reinterpret the statutory provision to
prohibit tax subsidies in exchanges established by the Federal
Government," Chris Walker, an assistant professor at the
Michael E. Moritz College of Law who clerked for Justice Anthony
Kennedy, wrote Thursday.

The biggest favor CJ Roberts did in Obamacare case was not applying "Chevron deference," protecting interpretation from future President.